"In office less than two weeks and Governor Glenn Youngkin has already set up an email tip line for parents to report teachers for teaching divisive subjects,” said CNN's Jim Acosta. “I seem to remember Glenn Youngkin campaigning in a fleece vest in Virginia. He was running as a different kind of Republican. I was told there was going to be a vest, not a Soviet-style police state across the Potomac from Washington."
Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares responded, noting that Acosta should open a history book. “I think what Jim Acosta said — listen, my family fled Communist Cuba. You want to talk about what ‘Soviet-style’ looks like? It’s the opposite of freedom,” he said. “So clearly, Jim Acosta maybe needs to take some history classes of what Soviet-style communism actually looks like. And [Virginia is] the opposite.”
Your humble servant actually attended elementary school while living in the prototype of a “Soviet-style police state” (Castroite Cuba). Snitching was definitely part of the curriculum encouraged by the school officials—but it was snitching against your parents for any “counter-revolutionary” words or actions. This, of course, amounts to the exact opposite of what Youngkin proposes, which is to give parents some level of control over what their children are taught at school.
Fascinatingly enough, Jim Acosta’s father, much like Miyares' parents, was born in Cuba and fled to the U.S. to escape a literal Soviet-style police state. So that urgently needed “history lesson” for Acosta should not be difficult to arrange.
Problem is, publicly telling the truth about Soviet-Cuban-style-police-states might imperil Acosta’s CNN gig. To wit:
Jim Acosta, unlike most Cuban exiles in the U.S. and their descendants, is warmly welcomed by the KGB-mentored communist apparatchiks who (still) run Stalinist Cuba. Since 2009, upon his first visit to the Castro-Family-Fiefdom, Jim Acosta has been dutifully following his CNN/Democrat Party instruction-manual and dutifully propagandizing against the (so-called) Cuba embargo -- the lifting of which has been the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate’s obsessive goal for decades.
“It's not that my dad was an anti-Castro ideologue shaking his fist at his former homeland,” Acosta wrote upon arriving in Havana in March 2016 with the Obama media entourage. “He was never that guy…. Also, he grew up in Virginia, not Miami. It was just a different Cuban-American experience.”
See there, amigos? It’s not that Acosta’s Stalinist hosts hadn’t completely vetted him – and knew his and his family’s political views frontwards and backwards – before issuing his visa. It’s that on top of publicly preening his “trustworthiness” to his Stalinist hosts, Jim—for the benefit of his CNN audience–had to also distance himself from that insufferable majority of tacky “right-wing Cuban-exiles.”
In brief, you’re not getting and keeping a Cuban journalist visa (much less a Havana Bureau) unless you shamelessly (and genuinely) collude with Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored ministry of propaganda—i.e. unless you create Fake News. This isn’t rocket science, amigos.
In sharp contrast to his roaring, snarling, chest thumping manner of addressing Republican officials in front of cameras, Jim Acosta’s nervous brown-nosing of Raul Castro back in March 2016 outdid both Eddie Haskell upon his every greeting of June Cleaver and The Scarecrow’s upon meeting the Wizard of Oz.
Jim Acosta: Thank you, your honor…I mean your Excellency…I mean your Wizardry…
Raul Castro: You have the effrontery of asking me about political prisoners, you billowing bale of bovine fodder?!
No…Seriously, amigos. Here’s the exchange:
Jim Acosta: “Gracias, President Castro. Thank you, President Castro, for your hospitality here in Havana. I wanted to know, please sir, if you have Cuban political prisoners and why you don’t release them.”
Raul Castro (whose regime, over the decades, has jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror and murdered more political prisoners in its first three years in power than Hitler’s regime murdered in its first six):
“Well, give me a list of the political prisoners and I will release them immediately. Just mention the list. What political prisoners? Give me a name or names or when — after this meeting is over, you can give me a list of political prisoners, and if we have those political prisoners, they will be released before tonight ends.”
END OF STORY! That was IT, amigos.That future ROARING LION of a Sarah Huckabee Sanders interrogator promptly tucked his wagging tail between his shivering legs, whimpered another “please” and “thank you” to “President” Castro (who everybody with half a brain knows keeps hundreds of political prisoners hidden from the Red Cross) shut up, and sat down.
Several organizations including the Cuban-American National Foundation, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Center for a Free Cuba quickly compiled lists of Cuban political prisoners to present to Castro. But we are unaware of any follow-up by Jim “Roaring Lion!” Acosta with “President” Castro regarding the list of political prisoners or the Stalinist dictator’s pledge to promptly release them.
Actually, CNN’s Acosta is simply upholding a long and sniveling CNN tradition. Indeed, no serious Cuba-watcher expects a network bestowed a Havana bureau by KGB-trained apparatchiks to even feign honesty, or even play-act its professed duty “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
“Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy!" CNN founder Ted Turner gushed to a capacity crowd at Harvard Law School during a speech in 1997. "You people would like him! Most people in Cuba like him."
Within weeks CNN was granted its coveted Havana Bureau, the first ever granted by Castro to a foreign network. Bureau chief Lucia Newman (later with Al Jazeera) assured viewers, "CNN will be given total freedom to do what we want and to work without censorship." Right.